


they're both mine

by gloss



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Art, Graffiti, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, instafic, swpolyamoryweek, tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 16:16:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6617485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe, Finn and Rey in the South Bronx in the late 70s. Graffiti.</p><p>For <a href="http://swpolyamoryweek.tumblr.com/">Star Wars Polyamory Week</a>, day 4: Historical AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	they're both mine

**Author's Note:**

> Notes toward a huge thing, with occasional fic-like moments. [Images on my tumblr](http://spaceoperafeerie.tumblr.com/) (tagged SW_WS but Tumblr's being an ass and not linking).
> 
> Title from [Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L_YHWQMFu4): _I got one in the front and one behind/And I'm in the middle because they're both mine_

They met each other, lost each other, met again. Much later, when the curators and collectors and biographers come crowding in like flies on the corpses, the story gets simplified for ease of consumption. But what really happened, all their chance meetings and sudden separations, was much, much messier.

*

**P.O.E.**

Prey on everyone. 

Proles overthrow everything.

Party over the earth.

Power only extinguishes.

Poverty omits escape.

By the time he hooks up with Finn and Rey, he's been known as Poe for so long that he doesn't have any other name. Over the years, he comes up with a series of glosses, depending on the circumstances, what kind of mood he's in, who's doing the asking.

When he started, all you had was your tag. You sign the city, endorse your presence, engrave your existence.

"'cause I'm *poor*," he tells Finn that first night when they all but crash into each other. "Used to be PO 169 but the E's for East."

"Shit, my granma's on 167th," Finn replies. They break from the grind-and-grab they've got going, kiss-smeared lips and hitched, heavy breaths. Finn hooks his fingers into the loops of Poe's corduroy pants and leans back a little, smiling. "She was, I mean."

Poe, backed up against the rough wall of the Hunts Point Avenue station, shakes his head, nice and slow, smiling. His hair's standing out, almost 'fro-big, and it snags on the wall. Finn's never done anything like this, but somehow reaching over, freeing the tangles, is even stranger and more thrilling and *dangerous* than making out with the boricua dude he met all of two hours ago.

Poe tips his head against Finn's palm, eyes drifting closed. They open again, look almost swollen under the sickly yellow light from further up the stairwell, as he turns to press his open mouth to Finn's palm. His tongue scrolls over the lines and sensitive skin, makes Finn rock back up against him, press him back hard, flatten him, against the wall, press his face into the sweaty curve of Poe's neck, feel his heavy stubble scrape a new life into him.

*

Finn goes looking for Poe in the old neighborhood, and finds Rey instead, holed up in one of the burned-out townhouses a couple blocks from the Bronx River Houses.

He isn't lost, he knows where he is, but that place is transformed, set under some witch's spell so that he might as well be trudging through the landscape of death. Charred walls look like they're being clawed open by enormous beasts from beneath the asphalt. There's more rubble in open lots than buildings still standing.

When he sees the flash of green against pale, broken stone, he goes to investigate. He doesn't know different styles yet, couldn't tell you for the life of him the difference between a burner and wildstyle, but he knows he likes this. Someone's painted a single, twisting vine rising up to the fourth floor, dodging back and forth across the building's corner; there are, he realizes, about fourteen different shades of green at work, and some broken glass glued in to catch the light. It's the prettiest thing he's seen in weeks.

Either it doesn't belong here, or it's the first clue that he *is* in the right place and the broken, fire-clawed landscape is the illusion.

"Don't touch that!" a girl calls from the top floor. 

Finn yanks his hand back from the wall. 

She's leaning dangerously far out the window. About his age, scrawny as anything. "It's still wet."

"What is it?" he asks.

Her dark hair hangs down on either side of her face, pointing toward him like arrows, targeting him. "Glass."

"No, obviously, but --"

"I'll come down," she says but she doesn't sound very happy about it.

*

Finn's been living in a group home out in Brooklyn. He's doing everything right - finishing high school, enrolling in *ROTC* - and he's miserable.

Then he meets, first, this older tagger who kisses him like they're on a soap opera, like this is the best and hottest thing he's ever thought of doing, and, second, an angry brilliant girl who tells him that he's moving in with her and that's that.

She pushes him on his back on the old queen mattress in the middle of the floor. There are paler squares on the walls where someone's family pictures, maybe repros of the Last Supper, once hung, but this is a ghost home now. Or it looked like one, until Rey takes his hand and invites him in. She straddles him, small hands on his shoulders, and her hair points right at his heart.

Rey is the queen. Her tag's just that green vine wrapped into a crown and once he meets her, he sees it *everywhere* he goes.

It's harder to find Poe, the man or the tag. The traces he does see are old, already covered by other tags and images, Howard the Duck and Mickey Mouse and messed-up Coca-Cola logos. It's like Poe is peeking at them all over the city.

*

He has no problem explaining, then or later, that his tag is just his file number at DSS: FN-2187, just his initials and an arbitrary number, probably for some punch card or something.

He starts small. He's not Rey, he doesn't dream and then change what she sees to match what she dreams. He isn't Poe, either, wherever Poe is; he doesn't dare to penetrate the ghost stations or the train yards with the tightest security. he isn't about to dangle off the pedestrian bridge to spray his tag over the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

But he will play lookout. He will hold cans, give you a boost-up, even tote your gear to the next street party if you're looking into being an MC. He'll do anything for you, if you need a hand.

His tag is quiet and unadorned; you'd have to look closely to realize it is a tag and not part of some arcane but official signage, some kind of MTA code.

*

Art's not what they call it, not at first. Art is for rich people; it's still and portable. You buy it and own it.

What they do is tagging, staking a claim, making a point. No one can own it, and it can disappear overnight or linger for years. (One afternoon Finn is way out in Queens, all the way past Jamaica, when he passes a small, still-brilliant red PO-167 on the elevated's underpass. So old he hadn't even gotten to using the E yet, but preserved like a lion's roar in La Brea.)

This isn't art, this is life. 

But rich people like it all the same. Finn and Rey are in the far reaches of Manhattan, way downtown, nearly against the Hudson, at a party in an old, dark loft where they don't know *anyone*. How they got here is a mystery in itself - someone's cousin knew a tagger in Harlem who was getting boosted by Freddy and that's how they heard about a gallery owner who's always looking for fresh new talent.

"Which sounds like she's *grocery* shopping," Rey hisses. "Or a pervert. Probably both."

Finn pops another sausage canapé, then a tiny quiche, in his mouth. "Maybe she's nice."

Rey snorts and, swallowing, he grins at her. "Free food, open bar, pretty lady. I'm having a great time, I don't know what your problem is."

She doesn't like strangers. He knows that, but squeezes her hand, and she finally steals three pigs in blanket from his overfilled plates and eats them at once. 

"Feel like a freak," she confesses a little later. "Like we're at the zoo but on the wrong side of the fence."

Finn gets that. It doesn't bother him much - people are people, they come from different places, bring different attitudes - but he understands. "You're the prettiest, though."

She's wearing a tiny black camisole, silky nylon with ribbon-thin straps, and pink jeans. She rolls her eyes at him and elbows him, hard. "Weirdo."

"Have some champagne," he urges. "It makes me sneeze. It's *great*."

When he returns with a glass for her, weaving his way through the crowd, having told at least four people that he's *not* Freddy, Freddy is older and skinnier and taller than he is, Finn finds Rey talking to an older woman who's all of five feet but stands like she's bigger than the Statue of Liberty. Her dress is white, and clinging in a particularly *expensive* way, one that suggests not only would Finn never be able to afford something like that, he wouldn't even know the name of the fabric.

The dress is open almost to her waist; constellations and galaxies of twinkling stones on chains decorate her bare skin. Finn thinks of Rey's broken glass, how carefully she places them, just so. The woman's hair is braided and plaited and wound around her head in dizzying patterns.

"La Reina," the woman is saying, clasping Rey's hand - which is weird in and of itself, since Rey is *smiling* back like they've known each other all her life, "at *my* party! I can't believe it! Do you have *any* idea how long I've been looking for you?"

Finn stands there, just at the edge of the crowd, watching them, until the condensation on the champagne flutes in his hands starts running over his knuckles.

"Care to share?" someone asks him. "Or is it a double-fisting night?"

"Huh?" Finn takes a second or two to tune back in. He feels like the weird, silver-white static you see when the TV's stuck between channels. "Oh, champagne. No, take it." He holds it out, then snatches it back. "Wait, it's pretty warm --"

"I'm *really* not picky," the man tells him, liberating the flute from Finn's hand and drinking it down, all in one motion. His neck is *long*, Finn can't help but notice, his jaw strong and dark with incipient beard, and when he swallows, his Adam's apple bobs outrageously.

"Poe," Finn says. "Wait. Poe? You *live*?"

He gets champagne spilled all over his front when Poe recognizes him and hugs him so hard that Finn almost falls over.

*

"Yeah," Poe says, nodding, turning around, taking in their work while she and Finn stand, a little fidgety, in the doorway. "Yeah, this is the stuff."

He shakes the hair out of his eyes and rocks back on his bare feet. 

"Yeah?" Finn asks. He doesn't know which makes him more nervous - showing their work to Poe or introducing him to Rey. Little - a lot - of both.

"He's very good," Rey says, lifting her chin and tightening her grasp on Finn's arm.

"Think you've both got it." Poe lifts one shoulder, his Yankees jersey rising, exposing the hair below his navel. He crosses the room double-quick. "Think I want in, in fact."

Of course, later, he also observes that they're going to be the death of him, but no one takes that seriously.

*

Maybe it is art, what they do. Maybe, some articles suggest, they're changing what art can be. Who it can mean things for.

Poe laughs at the bullshit, but he's particularly good at slinging it, too. 

They sleep in the day, in stifling summer light and skeleton-cold winter mornings, sprawled across the mattress with limbs entangled - Rey's hand in Poe's, Poe's leg across Finn's, Finn's mouth open and singing out his snores.

They work at night, creeping through train yards, hiding under the tracks or flat atop an abandoned car until the guard passes. They work quickly, silently, three abreast or Rey on one of the guy's shoulders, the hiss of the cans and snake-rattle of the mixer the only evidence they are there. And in a city that's burning down, going broke, imploding and yet somehow, always, *pushing on through* to the next day, those noises are inaudible. They're not screams or death rattles, and they're certainly not clinking gold or whispering bills.

They're just living.

*

Poetry only escalates.


End file.
